Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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Just a backdrop
My wife and I took a whirlwind trip out west this past weekend. There were a number of compelling reasons for the voyage: our yearning to catch up with a son that we hadn’t seen since his return from the sands of Afghanistan; the need to bolster the spirits of my almost 90-year-old mother, who by all reports was starting to fade badly in a nursing home after being forced to leave her own home at last; and an urge to re-connect with my wife’s ailing step-mother, whom we hadn’t seen since her husband’s death almost five summers ago. It was going to be a jam-packed two and a half days.
Since all these people now live in Alberta, however, it would also be an opportunity to show off to my wife my beloved home town and home province. Edmonton’s beautiful river valley, easily its best feature (the West Edmonton Mall being way down the list), was at its most verdant, and the weather was warm and dry.
The rest of the people we had to see were right there in Edmonton, but Saturday morning would be reserved for the three-hour drive to Cochrane, just northwest of Calgary, where my wife’s stepmother lived in a retirement home, nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. And that was going to be one of the bonuses of our trip to Alberta, a chance for my eastern-bred wife to see, up relatively close, some real topography.
But as we drew nearer and nearer to Cochrane, there arose a mystery - the mountains were nowhere to be seen. There were a few low foothills, but that was all. So now my wife began to be deeply suspicious of all the stories I’d told of my youth in the Rockies. When we went to Whitehorse in December for a wedding, she saw none of that city’s fabled mountain surroundings either. That time, I explained it was the ice fog, a frequent plague in the Whitehorse winter. This time, though, I was flummoxed, although being a natural-born Calgary hater (as all Edmontonians are), I strongly suspected that the air pollution drifting over from that boomtown had smothered and hidden the mountains. Cursed cowtown.
I have indeed told my Ontario family many stories about my days among the mountains. About several summers staying at the Banff School of Fine Arts as a counsellor for a United Nations Model Security Council. About more summers planting trees in the foothills just north of Jasper, probably the healthiest time of my life (apart from the time I slipped on a damp log and cracked a few ribs). About taking my beloved Toyota Corolla up the logging and mining roads high above the south Yukon village of Carcross. About flying into the foothills of the British Mountains near the Arctic Ocean, part of a scientific expedition searching for the remains of a long-lost Soviet aviator.
What my senses remember most about these alpine adventures is the bracing fragrance. The air was incredibly clean up there (despite my soiling it with my car or my airplane). Often I would just stop what I was doing for a few moments and drink it in.
So this was what I wanted my dear wife to experience. But in Whitehorse all she could smell was the wood smoke under a temperature inversion. And in Cochrane, there was a similar odour. On inquiry, we were told that the reason the mountains were invisible was the drifting smoke from all the forest fires in that part of Alberta and B.C. Even if we’d gone closer, we wouldn’t really have seen the mountains any better, just been overwhelmed by the stink of the smoke.
But Lisa wasn’t buying any story about forest fire smoke.
“You’re making it all up,” she sneered. “These mountains don’t really exist.”
That remark took me back to a summer evening in 1970 on the main street of the town of Jasper. An American female tourist, assuming I was more or less local, asked for directions to a restaurant and then, pausing to look at the surrounding peaks, asked, “Isn’t it almost time for y’all to take those in for the night?”
Some people I’ve related that story to over the years are certain the woman was pulling my leg; surely no one could be that breathtakingly stupid. But I assure you that she sincerely believed the Rockies were just a backdrop that someone with Parks Canada hoisted up early each morning, and hauled down every night. The mountains being beyond her experience, she was convinced they weren’t real.
My wife is beginnning to think she was on to something.
